Bernard Berenson Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Bernard Berenson
A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.

Bernard Berenson
Perhaps the most despairing cry of he pessimistic mind is that the world is never quite as bad as it ought and should be for intellectual purposes.

Bernard Berenson
The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.

Bernard Berenson
In figure painting, the type of all painting, I have endeavoured to set forth that the principal if not sole source of life enchantments are Tactile Values, Movement and Space Composition.

Bernard Berenson
Pessimism like calumny is easy to do, and attracts immediate attention. The gossiper and the writer may find this out soon enough, and a little encouragement from the current mood will procure them successes that bring endless imitators in their trail. On the other hand saying good things about life in general and individuals in particular and making it interesting is a serious task which few can achieve with credit.

Bernard Berenson
I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?

Bernard Berenson
Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

Bernard Berenson
International affairs will be placed on a better footing when it is understood that there is no way of punishing a people for the crimes of its rulers.

Bernard Berenson
No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art...our world would have remained a jungle.

Bernard Berenson
Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.

Bernard Berenson
It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember - I need not recall - that I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one.

Bernard Berenson
The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

Bernard Berenson
You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.

Bernard Berenson
I never felt that there was anything enviable in youth. I cannot recall that any of us, as youths, admired our condition to excess or had a desire to prolong it.

Bernard Berenson
Almost from the cradle to the grave one has an audience to whom one is playing up. The story of these audiences succeeding one another, their character and quality should be treated as an important part of biography or an autobiography.

Bernard Berenson
All we really want is otherness, tossing from side to side, and greeting every toss with shouts of welcome, and of contempt for the previous toss.

Bernard Berenson
Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

Bernard Berenson
It makes me happy to encounter goodness, love of work, humane intelligence, and people no matter at what kind of job, be it ever so humble, or ever so exalted, who do it well and con amore.

Bernard Berenson
I walk in the garden, I look at the flowers and shrubs and trees and discover in them an exquisiteness of contour, a vitality of edge, or a vigour of spring, as well as an infinite variety of colour that no artefact I have seen in the last sixty years can rival...each day, as I look, I wonder where my eyes were yesterday.

Bernard Berenson
Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.

Bernard Berenson
When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.

Bernard Berenson
I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.

Bernard Berenson